Time is right to adopt Murray-Darling plan

GET ready for water wars. That was the headline of an Age editorial in 1999. The battles have raged ever since. As ever, truth - in the form of factual evidence - has been a casualty. Independent federal MP Tony Windsor, who chaired the parliamentary inquiry into the Murray-Darling Basin Authority plan, happens to be able to call it as he sees it. As The Age reported yesterday, his key point is that the actual figures involved do not justify the wild claims being made.

The NSW Irrigators Council warns of ''social and economic Armageddon''. In May, Victorian Water Minister Peter Walsh called the plan ''a death warrant for communities in northern Victoria''- the cause of death being lack of water. Now he says Prime Minister Julia Gillard's latest announcement of further efficiency gains of 450 billion litres is no more than a ''stunt'' and a ''fantasy trip''. At the same time, he says boosting environmental releases from 2750 gigalitres to 3200GL will ''cause substantial and sustained flooding of towns and private land''. Federal Coalition water spokesman Barnaby Joyce, whose rhetoric is rarely rooted in solid fact, also questions Labor's ability to deliver water savings, saying: ''This is really into the never never land stuff.''

Mr Windsor points to a simple fact: most of the 2750GL target for reducing surface water use has been achieved. Citing ''all the figures on the record'', he said, ''the real amount of water that [still] has to be delivered to the environment is at most 800 gigalitres a year''. Detailed data on the authority's website confirm this. ''Contracted water recovery'' to September 30 amounts to 57 per cent of the target.

Furthermore, 650GL of the 2750GL won't come out of user entitlements but from reducing evaporation, leaks and waste. As for federal buybacks of entitlements, 1331GL has already been sold, all voluntarily. Only $56 million of the new $1.7 billion fund to deliver a 450GL ''top-up'' to win over South Australia may be in the budget, but this runs until 2024 and does not affect entitlements.

Advertisement

To put all these amounts in perspective, the proposed annual surface water allocation is 10,873GL a year. The cuts still to be made amount to less than 4 per cent of the 21,547GL in the system. (With the return of wet conditions, storages are 97 per cent full, excluding private storages.) The time is ideal to cut allocations to sustainable levels.

Compare the plan's supposedly ruinous 10,873GL cap to the amounts available in recent years: 3492GL in 2008-09, 3141GL in 2007-08 and 4458GL in 2006-07. From June 2001 to June 2008, as available water fell nearly 70 per cent, the gross value of irrigated agriculture fell all of 1 per cent. Drought created an irresistible pressure to use water much more efficiently.

The plan aims to reduce the vulnerability created by overuse of water. The return on investment will be a more resilient, productive system as agriculture, industry, communities and the environment suffer less damage from natural variability. This should be a bipartisan project. The hurdle encountered by the Howard and Gillard governments is the same: resistance from states with a dismal record as custodians of the basin. Everyone knows water was overallocated. No one wants to give up any.

The Howard government's 2007 Water Act aimed to rescue national water policy from the clutches of the states. The federal Coalition is now split on state lines and is yet to declare its position. A year ago, federal Water Minister Tony Bourke rightly said: ''There is no consensus in Murray-Darling reform; never has been, never will be.'' Today, though, that reform is essentially a federal decision-making process. The marathon development of this plan also makes a mockery of state warnings not to rush it.

Mr Burke says he aims to sign off on the plan before the final sitting week of Parliament late next month. He should do so, and the Coalition should back this vital national reform.